Leopold Kohr - In 1941, Austrian-born economist Leopold Kohr wrote an iconoclastic
essay in Commonweal entitled "Disunion Now: Plea for a Society Based
Upon Small Autonomous Units." In that essay, he argued that European
unity based on large-nation states would lead inevitably to domination by
Germany, the largest state.

Anticipating present-day objections to the Maastricht
superstate, Kohr argued instead for the breakdown of Europe into ethnically-mixed
city regions.

Recently, he spoke to NPQ Senior Editor Marilyn Berlin
Snell in London. The following is adapted from that conversation.

Tottering amidst gales of popular doubt, the Maastricht
Treaty will go down in history alongside the Tower of Babel. And for the
same reason: Because the Lord, that is, the law of nature, is against
it.

Constructions on such a grand scale don't work. Wherever
we look in the political universe, we find that successful social organism,
be they empires, federations, states, counties, or cities, have in all
their diversity of language and traditions one common feature: The small-cell
pattern. The problem is not to grow but to stop growing; the answer: Not
union but disunion.

Pathagoras long ago said that man - not the nation, not
the superstate - is the measure of all things. And man is small. Man is
not "mankind." He is not even France of Germany, no less is
he Europe.

That is why the patching together of what remains of
the Maastricht Treaty at the Edinburgh Summit in mid-December was a phyrric
victory for the European leaders and technocrats who sill dream of a superstate.
Their strength today lies in the unanimity of their error - and from Denmark
to Switzerland it is waning with each referendum.

It appears that in spite of having been submerged in
great unitarian states for long periods and having been subjected to an
unceasing battering of unifying propagandas, particularist sentiments
still exits in undiminished strength.

The European proponents of union have obviously failed
to grasp this fact, or the fact that the real conflict of this age is
no longer between races, classes, left vs. right, socialism vs. capitalism
- all hangover consequences from the past. The real conflict of today
is between man and mass, the individual and society, the citizen and the
state, the big and the small community, between David and Goliath.

As I predicted 50 years ago in an essay entitled "Disunion
Now," the idea of European unity based on large nation-states will
wither before it can bloom. With every step toward further union, collapsed
comes closer.

After the razor-thin French endorsement of the Maastricht
Treaty in September, former German foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher
argued that "to stall now on European unity means regression."
He is right. For its hubris, Europe has been subjected to the punishment
of the gods: If the descendants of Jean Monnet don't continue to peddle
the bicycle of European unification they will fall over.

Yet the accommodation of modern European history with
the laws of physics would be much easier. Stability could readily be achieved
if the European bicycle had so many wheels that it could balance itself.
It would not need to be steered from Brussels.

To secure that kind of balance, however, the European
bicycle must have small wheels of roughly equal size and strength. This
is not theory but mathematics: With nations of different economic and
political powers as its members, any federation will in its ultimate stage
function as a mere instrument of its most powerful unit.

This particular theory of power is not lost on the people
of Europe, which is why they are so nervous about Germany's role. Clearly,
if Europe insists on uniting under present circumstances - with Germany
being far stronger economically than any other member state - the only
"Europe" we will see will be a German one.

As this eventuality looms nearer, I suspect that European
disunion will begin anew. With the Maastricht Treaty in such trouble and
with the whole world seized by the fever of dissolution, the idea of a
united Europe seems distant indeed.

What, then, is the answer? Two outstanding examples of
successful federations are the United States and Switzerland, which have
both thrived not because they have succeeded in cutting potential great-power
regions into small sovereignties. In the U.S., for instance, there is
no great Midwestern state weighing down on the independence of smaller
states and paralyzing the effectiveness of the federal government.

And in Switzerland we find not a federation of three
nations, as is often assumed, but a union of 22 states - called cantons
- whose very function is to destroy and disunite the nationalities in
order to unit the whole.

Political experts hold Switzerland up to the world as
an example of the peaceful coexistence of some of the most diverse nations
of earth. Actually, nothing is further from the truth. The percentages
of Switzerland's three national groups are roughly: 70 percent German,
20 percent French and 10 percent Italian. If these were the basis of her
famed union, the inevitable result would be the exercise of dominion of
the large German-speaking bloc over the other two nationalities, which
would then be degraded to the status of "minority." The rules
of democracy would not impede but favor such a development, and the reason
for the French-and-Italian-speaking communities would be gone.

Instead, the greatness of the Swiss idea derives from
the fact that it is a union of states, not of nations. There are populations
of Bernese, Zurichois, Genevese, etc. and not Germans, French and Italians.
The strength of this cantonal system lies in its culturally and ethnically
mixed parts.

The same idea could work in the rest of Europe. In fact,
nothing would be easier than breaking Europe down into small regions.
Unlike building a unifying edifice, there would be little natural resistance
to this course, since small regions already exist. In Europe today we
find not Germany but Bavaria and Saxony; not Great Britain, but Scotland
and Ireland; not Spain but Pais Basqua and Catalonia; not Italy but Lombardy.
These regions have not been obliterated by their fusion into modern nation-states.
They retain the enchantment of their accents, customs and literature.

A Europe of regions, it has been argued, will end up
a Europe of perpetual war and petty nationalisms. Inevitably, there will
be collisions. But without large-scale nation-states, the ravages of conflict
will not amount to the wholesale genocide or holocaust we have seen this
century. Creating waves in a bathtub doesn't wreck ships. As in all things,
scale is the poison.

What I envision for a workable European community is
a plethora of small regional states that interact the way atoms do in
nature. I adopt the analysis of the Nobel physicist Irvin Schredinger
on why atoms must be small:

In the first place, they are very numerous. Secondly
they are constantly in motion. Thirdly, they are never governed by another
atom. Because no one guides them, they constantly collide. If they were
like large tanks, they would shatter themselves and the entire system.
But because they are small, the myriad and random collisions are creative.

It has been argued that though "small is beautiful"
it can also be ugly. Recently, Yugoslavia is cited as a prime example
of this potential. But I believe that the former parts of Yugoslavia are
at war with each other today because they are still not small enough and
the component parts are not yet of equal scale. The former Yugoslavia
is still composed of unequally sized, ethnically based political communities
dominated by the Serbs. Peace cannot come as long as the present scale
of political organization maintains. There is no solution until further
breakup occurs.

Yugoslavia today is the political equivalent of a supernova,
which explodes and ejects most of its accumulated excess mass.

Whether in the former Yugoslavia or elsewhere in Europe
the original units were not tribal. In fact, I believe that tribalism
is the result unnatural unification rather than the cause of disunion.
Before the nation-state capture Europe, there were smaller, sovereign
centers of social existence, similar to today's Swiss cantons, and based
upon a convivial scale of interaction. The regional centers of Padua,
Florence, Siena and Pisa once were the sovereign shapers of the most supreme
art, architecture and music on earth. They only became "provincialized"
and lost their spirit when unified into larger entities.

Such a model of sovereign centers, linked together in
a federation, would best suit Europe in the next century. To achieve that
end, not only must Germany be broken up, but, simultaneously, so must
France, Spain and Italy. Europe's best hope is dismember itself politically
and economically into subnational regions.

The great tragedy of the 20 century - and we are still
not out of the woods - has been the parochial mentality of the intolerant
tribe organized on the large scale of the nation-state. When the final
disillusionment with the Maastricht Treaty sets in it will be surely realized
that it is the most naive of illusions to believe that a superstate is
the antidote to the nationalism of its largest members.

The hope of the 21st century must be based on another
model altogether, a model that seeks the universality at the smallest
scale; a model that recognizes that the fullness of existence is contained
in the tiniest of spaces. The spirit of man doesn't require the vast expanse
of an Alexanderplatz to reach the sublime.

Legend has it that a little boy in one of the ancient
Greek city-states asked his father, "Do other places have their own
moon?"

"Of course," his father replied. "Everyone
has his own moon."

It is better that way. And we might add that wisdom:
We don't need the Single European Act, the European Monetary System or
a common foreign policy to have our own moon.